Time Machine Help

I recently purchased a mac mini. i want to back up everything on it. because im about to put windows on it. if i use time machine to back up the mac and say i get a virus from windows could i use the time machine and restore the mac? and everything will be how it was with no viruses and windows will be gone??

and can i back up the mac one time and turn time machine off??
will it still work.

I recently purchased a mac mini. i want to back up everything on it. because im about to put windows on it. if i use time machine to back up the mac and say i get a virus from windows could i use the time machine and restore the mac? and everything will be how it was with no viruses and windows will be gone??

Yes. That would rather defeat the purpose of maintaining a backup, though. I have an external drive connected that I only turn on once a week or so to let it update my backup. I don't need an hourly backup, just something recentish.

I recently purchased a mac mini. i want to back up everything on it. because im about to put windows on it. if i use time machine to back up the mac and say i get a virus from windows could i use the time machine and restore the mac? and everything will be how it was with no viruses and windows will be gone??

and can i back up the mac one time and turn time machine off??
will it still work.

help please

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If you use bootcamp as your way of putting windows on the computer, then time machine will back up the mac OS X Partition only. Most likely a virus will not transfer from your windows partition to your mac partition because windows viruses are windows specific and normally in .exe files which are not executable by macs. But yes, If you use time machine to back up your mac you can restore the entire system at any time. Also if you are using bootcamp there is a program that you can use called winclone that you can use to make a periodic image of your entire windows system. If a virus ever infects your windows system, you can just use winclone to use the image you created and restore the system to an earlier state. This makes it easy to restore the system and insures you don't lose any important files from a virus infestation.

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